Umbraco vs Drupal for publishers: .NET or PHP, and who builds it?

The short version

Pick Umbraco if your developers write C# and your IT department already runs Microsoft infrastructure. It is MIT-licensed, built on ASP.NET Core, and its documentation describes five default user groups, scheduled publishing and unpublishing for each document, and an opt-in Content Delivery API for headless use. Managed hosting through Umbraco Cloud is quoted rather than priced publicly.

Pick Drupal if your publication has many content types, several desks with different permissions or several languages, and you can staff a PHP build. Core includes Content Moderation, multilingual modules and JSON:API. SEO helpers and scheduling come from contributed modules.

The deciding trade-off is ecosystem and house stack, because both are free software that needs developers. Umbraco gives a conventional .NET build with built-in scheduling. Drupal gives more configuration depth and more modules to assemble. Our full profiles cover Umbraco and Drupal. Both rest on vendor documentation, not our own install.

At a glance

Editorial workflow

Umbraco’s documentation lists five default user groups: Administrators, Editors, Translators, Writers and Sensitive Data. Writers can read, create and update but cannot publish, which gives a basic submit-for-review pattern. Custom groups can be limited by section, language, document and property, so a freelancer can be restricted to one section. The product page also lists version control, audit trails and split-view editing, though we have not opened the detailed documentation for them.

Drupal’s core Content Moderation module builds workflows from states such as Draft, Published and Archived and the transitions between them. A published version can stay live while a working copy is reviewed, and a default Editorial workflow is created when the module is enabled. Permissions are granted to roles, so authors can save drafts and editors can publish.

Scheduling is the clearest split. Umbraco documents it per document. It relies on the server making HTTP(S) requests to itself, so rewrites, DNS or firewall rules can break it, and load-balanced setups need extra configuration. Drupal’s contributed Scheduler module covers content, media, commerce products and taxonomy terms. We have not verified how it works with moderation states.

If you need named multi-step approvals, Drupal’s explicit states and transitions are closer to that. For Umbraco, check what your version offers.

Search, structured data and feeds

Neither is complete out of the box. We did not find Umbraco documentation, in the pages we opened, for built-in sitemaps, RSS feeds, structured data or redirect management, so we claim none. Pages are rendered by templates your developers write, so titles, canonical tags and JSON-LD depend on the build or on packages.

Drupal splits SEO across contributed modules. Pathauto generates URL aliases for nodes, taxonomy terms and users. Metatag provides page titles, canonical URLs, descriptions, Open Graph and Twitter Cards. Simple XML Sitemap produces multilingual sitemaps with hreflang and image support and supports IndexNow. Schema.org and JSON-LD come from a separate module, according to the Metatag page. We did not verify Drupal feed behaviour.

On the evidence we have, Drupal has more documented SEO building blocks, and Umbraco leaves more to developers. That is a documentation gap as much as a product gap, so test a build. Follow Google’s documentation for news publishers, and use the feature checklist.

Hosting, performance and security

Umbraco’s requirements documentation states .NET 10.0 or higher for local development, SQL Server 2016 as the minimum supported version, and SQLite as an alternative. Supported operating systems include Windows, macOS and Ubuntu and other Linux distributions, with IIS on Windows Server and Azure through Umbraco Cloud. The vendor describes Umbraco Cloud as a managed platform on Azure and Cloudflare with automatic upgrades, backups and CI/CD.

Drupal 11.x requires PHP 8.3.0 or later and supports MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL and SQLite. It works on Apache, Nginx and other web servers. Linux is recommended, with Windows supported only for development. Composer is needed for installs and updates. Drupal 10.6.x receives security support only until December 2026.

We have no performance or security benchmarks for either. The practical difference is the operations skill each expects: Windows and .NET tooling for Umbraco, or Linux and Composer for Drupal. See the self-hosted guide.

Cost of ownership

Both licences are free. Umbraco’s MIT licence also lets agencies build commercial products on it, and Drupal.org says Drupal has no licensing fees under the GNU GPL. The Drupal Association is the non-profit supporting the project.

The costs are hosting, development and support. Self-hosted Umbraco needs a server with a supported database, so a managed database is a likely extra line. Umbraco Cloud’s product page lists features but no prices, offering a pricing calculator and a discovery call, so we publish no figure. We have not verified public prices for Drupal hosting or agencies either.

Budget for the update routine. Drupal updates run through Composer. Umbraco follows the .NET release cadence. Someone has to own that in both cases. See the cost guide and licensing guide.

Migrating between them

We did not find an official Umbraco-to-Drupal or Drupal-to-Umbraco migration tool in the documentation we opened, and we have not verified Drupal’s migration documentation. Moving means rebuilding content types and writing an importer between a .NET and a PHP data model.

Both can expose content as JSON, Drupal through core JSON:API and Umbraco through the opt-in Content Delivery API, which gives a scripted route to extract content. Map every URL and plan redirects before launch.

Which should you choose?

• IT department and agency already on .NET and Azure: Umbraco.
• PHP or Linux estate, several languages, formal moderation states: Drupal.
• Freelancers limited to a section or language: both support it; Umbraco through user groups restricted by section, language, document and property, Drupal through roles and permissions.
• Built-in scheduled publishing without a module: Umbraco, if its HTTP(S) self-call requirement is manageable.
• Most documented SEO building blocks: Drupal.
• Small newsroom without a developer: neither. See the CMS directory.

For another Drupal comparison, read Wagtail vs Drupal. The comparison hub lists the rest, and the demo page covers trials.